by Lynne Graham
He strolled over to her. ‘The gardens are rather wild—’
‘I don’t mind.’
‘But beautiful in an informal style,’ he completed.
She abandoned hope of shaking him off.
‘You’re like a fox waiting for the hounds to come in for the kill,’ Angelo remarked silkily as they descended the terrace steps, passing beds blazing with a mixture of perennials and wild flowers.
It wasn’t a bad comparison, but that he should openly make it outraged her pride. She snatched in air headily weighted with the scent of flowers and moved on in the direction of a rioting shrubbery.
‘You invite only weak, inadequate men to your bed,’ Angelo drawled. ‘That way you stay in control, and that’s very important to you, Kelda. Isn’t it?’
‘I find you incredibly offensive!’ she flared incredulously.
‘If you haven’t had much loyalty from your lovers, you can only blame yourself.’ Angelo dealt her furious hectically flushed face a chillingly amused glance. ‘Inadequate men boast and tell whoppers in news-print—’
‘Or sore losers!’ Kelda threw back, still walking at top speed, but the ground was descending steeply now and she was forced to slow down.
‘If it’s not too rude a question,’ Angelo murmured smoothly, ‘how many of them were losers?’
She whirled round and just exploded. Lifting her hand, she slapped him so hard across one hard cheekbone that her whole arm went numb, and then the pain came. She had hurt her wrist and she bent over, pressing it into her stomach, sucking in oxygen in a strangled gasp.
‘I could say it served you right.’ Angelo reached out for her arm and cradled her wrist between surprisingly gentle hands. His fingers explored her fine bones. She didn’t look at him, she stared fixedly at the grass until it blurred. ‘You’ve wrenched it, that’s all. Relax, cara...I’m not about to hit you back but I should warn you that I have a very hot temper. I lose it rarely but, when I do, sensible individuals dive for the nearest shelter.’
He released her hand. Her throat was closing over. Tears were threatening. Her emotions were storming about in all directions. ‘You can dump the Mr Nice Guy routine!’ she advised unsteadily. ‘I hate you, Angelo. I have always hated you. That’s what makes your ambition to seduce me into your bed so laughable!’
‘I could have screwed you in the Porsche with an audience of shocked pensioners, and all without one word of seduction,’ Angelo delivered with brutal candour.
Kelda jerked and flinched as though he had punched her in the stomach. She forced her head up, was literally nailed to the spot by the fierce anger flaming in his golden eyes. ‘No...’ she whispered in feverish, desperate denial.
‘And what does seduce mean?’ Angelo wasn’t finished with her yet. ‘To deceive? I have been totally honest with you. To corrupt? The days of your innocence are long gone. Once I would have put a wedding-ring on your finger before I touched you. I would have treated you with honour and respect—’
‘Stop it!’ She fled into the orchard of peach and cherry trees, frantic to escape that mercilessly cruel tongue.
She didn’t get very far before a powerful hand closed over one slim shoulder and yanked her back. He spun her round with frightening strength. ‘Look at me!’ he demanded with inborn arrogance, glittering dark eyes scanning her pale, distraught face. ‘Your freedom is gone, and not only now, cara. It’s gone for as long as I want you. I will keep you and I will clothe you and you will not make a single move that you haven’t cleared with me first. You are mine and you had better start adjusting to that idea fast. I am not the most patient of men.’
Shaking all over, Kelda sucked in great gulps of oxygen. She was devastated by what he had said. Every lancing syllable rang with savage confidence. ‘You can’t take my freedom a-away—’
‘But I already have,’ he reminded her. ‘And this is only the beginning.’
‘You can do nothing to m-me,’ she persisted, fighting sheer cold threat to the last bastion of her strength. ‘Talk’s cheap!’
He stared down at her and then released his breath in a slow hiss. ‘It doesn’t have to be like this cara. You can’t fight me and win. Surrender would be so much sweeter for both of us. Capitulate with grace and you will discover how generous I can be—’
‘I can live without emeralds and d-diamonds from Cartier,’ she had to force the assurance past her convulsed throat.
‘But I don’t think you can live without me.’ Angelo said with velvet clarity.
Kelda went white and then red, functioning on the most basic of responses. What she felt was pretty much what she thought. And what she felt was cold, hard fear followed by a sudden flaring surge of sexual awareness so intense that her whole body heated.
‘You need me—’
‘No,’ she argued fierily, ‘never. I have never needed any man.’
Angelo was unimpressed. He curved a lean hand almost negligently to her taut spinal cord. ‘Until me,’ he countered thickly, his lean, lithe body tensing against hers as her tongue snaked out to moisten her dry lips. ‘And I haven’t even kissed you yet...’
‘Let go, Angelo,’ she said breathlessly.
‘I think I will.’ His stunning eyes skimmed with hungry sensuality over her and then he drew her close with controlled power and took her mouth with slow, drugging intensity.
She was a good strong swimmer but she drowned in Angelo’s arms. Six years melted away and she was back, back where her body told her she belonged, back where the world contracted into the crazy thunder of her heart and the mad race of the hot blood in her veins. A sensation akin to a hot wire being jerked tight knifed through her stomach, and with a stifled moan she arched her back in response to a pleasure than was close to pain.
Angelo said something rough in Italian and he was tugging her down in the lush meadow grass. The two buttons on her back that secured her top came adrift, fabric drifting down her arms over her wrists in a soft whisper, and all the time he was making love to her mouth with a naked and devouring passion that excited her to the brink of madness. Her fingers were dug deep in the springy depths of his hair, tracing the shape of his head, luxuriating in the silky strands, holding him to her.
He pulled her hands away and lifted his mouth from hers and then he just looked at her, a feverish flush of colour accentuating his striking cheekbones, his breathing pattern audibly fractured.
Her breasts were small, high and perfectly formed. Her nipples were shamelessly distended rose-pink buds. Angelo released his breath in a long, sighing groan as though he was afraid to touch her. She knelt there in front of him, quivering all over, every heated inch of her flesh ready to take fire.
The silence was electric. A voracious hunger vibrated like a physical aura between them. ‘If I touch you...do you vanish?’ Angelo whispered unsteadily.
‘Do you?’ Without any need for thought to precipitate the action, she leant forward and all fingers and thumbs embarked on unbuttoning his silk shirt. When it was open, he trailed it off with scant ceremony.
She looked at him exactly as he looked at her: with a driven, utterly consuming absorption. She dragged passion-glazed eyes possessively over the bronzed breadth of his muscular chest. A tangle of rough dark curls clung damply to his golden skin, arrowing down into a silky furrow over his flat, hard stomach.
She couldn’t swallow, she couldn’t move, but she had never wanted so badly to touch another human being. It was a fire in her blood more potent and more powerful than any fever. Angelo reached for her in the same moment that she was about to reach for him. He hauled her on to his hard thighs and shaped her breasts with his hands. A stifled cry was dredged from her as he caught her nipples between thumb and forefinger and gently pulled on them.
She had not known that she would be so incredibly sensitive there that one touch and her whole body would become one gigantic yearning ache. But Angelo must have known by instinct.
‘You are so glorious,’ Angelo murmured against
the corner of her lips. ‘So perfect...bella, mia cara.’
His passionate mouth took hers and she shuddered with excitement as his clever fingers toyed with her swollen flesh. Nothing existed but the urgent, increasingly desperate hunger of her body to be submerged in his. He lifted her up as though she was a doll, unzipped her trousers, effortlessly peeled them away. Then he closed his hands over the ripe swell of her hips and buried his mouth hotly against her breasts.
It was electrifying. Her fingernails dug unwittingly into his broad shoulders as he licked and stroked and tantalised her to the edge of insanity. His hand cupped the apex of her thighs, his fingers splaying firmly against the damp scrap of silk and lace that was all that separated him from her.
‘You are mine,’ Angelo told her, lowering her into the grass with raw determination. ‘Tell me that, before I bury myself in that exquisite body...’
Her lashes lifted. She focused on blazing golden eyes and melted to the consistency of honey all in one go. ‘Yours,’ she framed in a whisper of sound torn from the very depths of her.
‘Always,’ Angelo attached with savage emphasis.
Her desire for him was so powerful, he could have made her say anything, do anything in that instant but then the outside world intervened. She heard the low mutter of male voices, a soft burst of laughter and she went rigid.
‘Gently, cara,’ Angelo soothed. ‘We’re behind a twenty-foot wall.’
Shaken up, Kelda stared up at him in sudden torment. Beyond him she saw the peach and cherry trees, and mental awareness returned. For a split-second, still agonisingly controlled by her aching body, she wished it away again. She wanted him so much, she wanted to die if she couldn’t have him. And she knew then without any helpful prompting from him what feeling suicidal felt like.
She knew then why she had always been afraid of Angelo. Why Angelo, alone of all men, threatened her peace of mind. You took fascination and obsession and a devastating physical desire and whatever the recipe produced, it was not hatred.
Through heavily lidded eyes Angelo dealt her an oblique look, the hard planes of his strong features shuttered. He reached for her discarded top and was smoothly feeding her arms into it before she grasped that, while she had been wildly out of control and lost to all reason, Angelo had never planned, it seemed, to consummate his desire for her in a peach and cherry orchard.
Had it been a punishment for calling that desire laughable? She turned cold and shivered. In anguish, she relived the torrid abandonment of her response to him. She didn’t feel like laughing. Fear fluttered in her throat and churned in her stomach. She was not as tough as she had thought she was. Angelo had shot down that illusion in flames.
With supreme self-assurance, Angelo reached down a lean hand and hauled her upright. Kelda trailed her fingers free in violent rejection. Her brain was working now at a furious rate. Nothing that Angelo had so far threatened her with was worth this humiliation! Tonight, somehow, some way, no matter what it took, she was leaving...
CHAPTER FIVE
KELDA had only brought one dress, fashionably floral, ankle-length and buttoned from scoop neckline to hem. She had packed it because it was casual and uncrushable. Her fingers fluttered tautly towards the glittering jewels still encircling her throat. People put collars on dogs to control them, and after the collar came the lead...it was all part of the training. Pure rage glittered in her emerald-green eyes. Later she would break the necklace. It certainly wasn’t going with her!
The high of fury and self-loathing powering her had yet to dissipate. She had degraded herself. She had been a fully participating partner in Angelo’s arms. Her skin burned as she recalled how he had made her feel, how she had behaved. There was no excuse. She was not a teenager at the mercy of rampaging hormones. She was a grown woman, supposedly in control of her own responses.
Dear heaven, she had actually thought that she had a fairly low sex drive. So many men had tried and failed to rouse her to passion. Her distaste for intimacy had been intense. She had blamed Angelo for her apparent frigidity. He had treated her appallingly that night six years ago. She had been at a very sensitive age when Angelo had contrived to combine sex, shame and sleaze all into one uneasy package inside her impressionable mind.
But what infuriated her most of all was that none of those inhibitions had prevented her from responding wildly to Angelo. It was sexual infatuation...what else could it be? A raw physical attraction of the lowest order. That Angelo had known that he could exercise such power over her, long before she herself even suspected it, was doubly humiliating. On that level, her own lack of experience made her a pitifully easy target and no way...absolutely no way was she sticking around for any further demonstrations!
Angelo was in the drawing-room when she came downstairs. Golden eyes gleamed beneath dense ebony lashes, a faintly sardonic curve hardening his eloquent mouth as he returned her perusal. Her chest tightened. She felt as if she had gone down in a lift too fast. And the spacious room suddenly felt claustrophobic.
‘What would you like to drink?’ he drawled smoothly.
He handed her the glass of pure orange with an edged smile of amusement that made her fingernails bite into the palm of her free hand.
‘You weren’t drunk on anything but desire this afternoon but I salute your choice,’ he murmured lazily. ‘Alcohol dulls all sensations.’
Her nails inflicted purple crescents on her palm. Her teeth ground together. She lifted her fiery head high. ‘Don’t you think this farce has gone far enough?’
‘Farce is comedy. I notice that you’re not laughing.’
‘Few people laugh at threats, grotesque or otherwise,’ Kelda countered fiercely.
A maid came in to announce dinner. Kelda sank down rigid-backed in a heavily carved chair in the dining-room. As soon as the main course had been served, she thrust up her chin. ‘I did nothing to be ashamed of six years ago! You have no right to threaten me and no excuse to keep me here!’ she told him angrily.
‘Nothing?’ Angelo repeated drily.
‘Nothing,’ Kelda reiterated with conviction. ‘And the way you treated me was absolutely unforgivable! When you came into the library that night, that boy was trying to rape me—’
Angelo quirked a satiric ebony brow. ‘Still tossing that old chestnut on the fire? Really cara...if you’re in search of an extenuating circumstance for what you did that night, can’t you do better than cry rape? In the light of your hot-blooded nature, I find it excessively hard to believe that rape would have been necessary.’
Furious colour flooded her cheeks, highlighting the brilliance of her green eyes. ‘I was switching out the lamps,’ she persisted doggedly. ‘I thought I was alone. He came up behind me and forced me down on to the floor. He hit me...’ her voice trailed away, her facial muscles tightening as she forced herself to continue ‘...he b-bit my breasts and he hurt me...’
What shattered her was Angelo’s raw burst of laughter. She had had to steel herself hard to describe that assault and she had been prepared to counter disbelief, but not the sheer earthy amusement raking through Angelo’s lean, muscular frame.
‘Love-bites,’ he breathed in a sizzling undertone that somehow contrived to combine the lingering remnants of his amusement with complete disdain. ‘I did notice them.’
‘I am telling you the truth!’ Kelda spat back at him tightly, painfully, outraged by his response. ‘I was terrified...if you hadn’t interrupted him, he would have got what he wanted!’
‘You’re not even a good liar,’ Angelo whipped back with derision. ‘The facts don’t fit. You were in a dark room behind a firmly closed door. You didn’t scream, you didn’t demand that I call the police, nor did you come up with the attempted rape story until that boy was safely out of the house.’
Her stomach was churning with nausea. She could have explained all those things but why should she humiliate herself by persisting? Describing that assault even briefly had brought it alive again. The sensation
of sick terror, overwhelming relief and shock had flooded back in a debilitating surge. Angelo’s laughter and derision had been brutally inappropriate. Trying to defend herself was a waste of time.
Loathing was rippling through her in violent waves now. How dared he dismiss her story out of hand? How dared he talk as though she had been a promiscuous little slut at eighteen? The truth lay at the other extreme. Compared with her considerably more experienced friends, she had been almost laughably innocent. But what was that saying about one picture being worth a thousand words? Angelo had seen her in a compromising position and had chosen to see only what fitted his own interpretation of her character.
In the electric silence she stared down at the plate in front of her without appetite and with sudden decision, she stood up, emerald eyes flashing like polished gemstones in the pale, taut stillness of her face. ‘I’m not hungry and I’m tired,’ she said shortly.
‘Madre di Dio...’ Angelo breathed with driven impatience. ‘You still sulk like a child!’
In the doorway, Kelda whirled round to face him again, all pale dignity banished by blazing anger. ‘You hateful bastard...somehow, some day, I’ll make you pay for bringing me here!’
As she strode through the hall, she paused beside an ornate marble and gilded side table. Angelo had tossed his car keys there earlier and they were still there, she noted with relief. She took the stairs two at a time, rage still storming through her veins in an energising tidal wave. Discarding the floral dress, she put on a pair of black leggings and a sweatshirt top before packing the remainder of her possessions. That small task taken care of, she sat down to wait for the rest of the household to go to bed.
It was one in the morning before Angelo retired for the night. She heard him passing by her room and froze for a second, but he didn’t even hesitate at her door. To be safe, she waited for another forty minutes and then her heart thumping unnaturally loudly in her eardrums, she grabbed up her bag, opened her door as quietly as a mouse and crept downstairs. With her breath in her mouth, she slowly lifted his car keys off the side table before tip-toeing down to the room Angelo employed as an office.